Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  In his philosophical writings, Dick would don, dwell within, and then discard one theory after another—as so many imaginative masks or personae—in his quest to unravel the mysteries of his two great themes: What is human? What is real?

  While the sparkling ideas cascade from story to story and from novel to novel and the visions become ever stranger, sometimes downright bizarre, one thing that remained relatively constant from Dick’s earliest days to his untimely death was his inability to believe that the world of our ordinary experience was ultimately real. In his abortive foray into the academic world of UC Berkeley, he was given Plato to read and “became aware of the possible existence of a metaphysical realm beyond or above the sensory world.” From that time on, he doubted the ability of our senses to give us a genuine knowledge of reality. Plato thinks that concealed behind our everyday world are the ‘Forms’ which are what’s ultimately real. Our rough-and-ready world is real only to the extent it connects up with those Forms or archetypes. Even our most carefully constructed scientific knowledge is merely a shadowy reflection of the knowledge we can have of this world of Forms, much as the reflection of a building that we might see in a pool of water is a distorted reflection of the building that we can directly see.

  Entranced by this Platonic vision, Dick believed that we could imagine a reality in relation to which our ordinary world was, as it were, merely a symptom or an appearance. He came to believe that “in a certain sense the empirical world was not truly real, at least not as real as the archetypal realm beyond it.”

  With unerring instinct, Dick zeroed in on those philosophers whose basic take on reality matched his dissatisfaction with the story that our senses tell us of our world. He was fascinated by the Pre-Socratic philosophers—Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Xenophanes—and among modern philosophers he read Leibniz, Whitehead, and Bergson. He was especially taken by the God-is-everything theory of the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, according to whom God and Nature are two sides of the same basic substance: “Of all the metaphysical systems in philosophy I feel the greatest affinity for that of Spinoza, with his dictum ‘Deus sive substantia sive natura’ [God or substance or nature]; to me this sums up everything.”

  Alternate Realities?

  When the work of the Adjustment Bureau is done, what’s the result? You get an alternate reality that’s more or less what you would have had anyway except for some small but significant differences—Worldb instead of Worlda. It’s as if, in a recording studio, someone rewound the tape, made some edits, and then ran it forward again to produce a new edition of familiar material. In “Adjustment Team” Ed Fletcher says, describing his boss, “He was a different man. But still Douglas—a different Douglas. A different version!” In the movie, The Adjustment Bureau, David Norris has a great political future ahead of him provided he stays away from Elise. If he doesn’t, well . . . as one of the operatives in the Adjustment Bureau says to him, in words chillingly reminiscent of the Godfather, “Just remember, we tried to reason with you.”

  Apart from the mere logical possibilities conjured up by philosophical speculation, can we point to anything in our actual experience which might support this idea of alternate realities? Dick thinks we can. “Didn’t I do or say this already?” we sometimes ask ourselves, or, “Haven’t I been here before?” Many of us at some stage are subject to an overwhelming conviction that we’ve been here, done this, or said that already but yet, not exactly this or that.

  Is this experience just a psychological oddity, explicable by an appeal to defective brain chemistry or childhood trauma or whatever, or is it a glimpse of another reality? Dick, for one, believes that such experiences are clues that

  at some past time point a variable was changed—reprogrammed, as it were—and that, because of this, an alternate world branched off, became actualized instead of the prior one, and that in fact, in literal fact, we are once more living this particular segment of linear time.

  The experience of déjà vu suggests that a “breaching, a tinkering, a change had been made . . . in our past.” In Time Out of Joint, the protagonist Ragle Gumm who unknowingly inhabits a kind of Truman Show-esque world is haunted by the feeling that he’s actually been in a building which he has only seen as a model. His acting upon this feeling is a key factor in his discovery of the sham world in which he lives and his acceptance of the (relatively) real world and its challenges.

  Dick remarks that while he had been preoccupied with “counterfeit worlds, semi-real worlds, as well as deranged private worlds inhabited, often, by just one person” for most of his writing life, it wasn’t until shortly before his death, that he hit upon a possible theoretical explanation for this preoccupation—simultaneously existing possible worlds. In his inimitable style, he described these worlds as a “manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one, the one that the majority of us, by consensus gentium [general consent] agree on.” We might grasp this somewhat gnomic utterance imaginatively by visualizing our normal time line extending in one dimension from past to future thickened, as it were, by many other possible worlds lying across it at right angles.

  At around the time Dick was entertaining this idea, in the world of professional philosophy, a system of metaphysics based on the idea of possible worlds was all the rage. While most philosophers used the idea of possible worlds merely as a technical device to explain our ideas of necessity and possibility, some, such as David Lewis, held that possible worlds are just as real as the actual world—our world being just that possible world in which we happen to live. I don’t know whether Dick knew of this philosophical movement or whether its practitioners knew of his writings. Had he known, he would surely have been amused by the coincidence, especially given his trenchantly expressed belief that “If SF becomes annexed to the academic world it will buy into its own death.”

  Moving from science fiction to science, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have recently supported what they call the “M-Theory” which holds that not just one but in fact many universes came into being from nothing and each of these universes “has many possible histories and many possible states at later times. Most of these states will be quite unlike the universe we observe” and “our presence selects out from this vast array only those universes that are compatible with our existence.” 9 Commenting on some of the consequences of this theory—for example, that the universe might not have a unique observer-independent history—they remark “That might sound like science fiction, but it isn’t” (p. 140). Dick must be smiling.

  Back to Earth

  Theories of reality, like the many sketched by Dick, that claim that what’s really real is something fundamentally different from the world of our ordinary experience are afflicted with an intractable problem.

  Our starting point for all that we do, say, and think is the world of our ordinary experience, the world of mid-sized objects and other people. We mow our lawns, design experiments, go for coffee with colleagues, teach our students, lust after the latest electronic gadget and read science fiction. No matter what theories we propose in whatever field, whether physics, chemistry, psychology, or philosophy, this humdrum world is the world from which we take our point of departure and the world which we never really leave. Even if we make temporary departures from it via thought or imagination, it is a world to which we always return. This ordinary world is unavoidably pre-supposed in everything we do, even in the propounding of theories which, if true, would demonstrate that our ordinary world isn’t ultimately real!

  The Zen masters say that in the beginning, mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers. After practicing Zen for some time, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers. But—and this is crucial—after further practice, mountains are again mountains, rivers are again rivers. The same mountains and rivers, yet subtly different. Our intellectual odysseys take us out of and beyond this world but where they take us we can
not live for long—the air is too rarefied and we have nothing solid upon which to stand. What those odysseys into the strange and new can do is to make our ordinary, workaday world strange and new to us again, removing from it the crust of familiarity created by custom and habit.

  The stories of Philip K. Dick and the films made from them, like The Adjustment Bureau, Blade Runner, and Minority Report, are exciting, challenging, bewildering, and fascinating but, like many of our holiday destinations, while they are nice places to visit, we wouldn’t, even if we could, want to live there. In the immortal words of the Hank Williams song, “No matter how we struggle and strive, we’ll never get out of this world alive.”

  14

  Trauma of the Real

  PAUL M. LIVINGSTON

  In an interview with Frank Bertrand in 1980, when asked how he first got interested in philosophy, Philip K. Dick referred to the classical writings of Plato:

  In college I was given Plato to read and thereupon became aware of the possible existence of a metaphysical realm beyond or above the sensory world. I came to believe that in a certain sense the empirical world was not truly real, at least not as real as the archetypal realm beyond it. At this point I despaired of the veracity of sense-data. Hence in novel after novel that I write I question the reality of the world that the characters’ percept-systems report.

  To see what Dick is getting at, let’s remember the most famous metaphor that Plato uses for his conception of the actual nature of reality. This is the metaphor of the cave, given in Book VII of Plato’s Republic.

  A number of prisoners are bound by chains in a cave. They face the back wall, where a procession of shadows appears. These shadows are cast by a series of puppets or shapes which, unbeknownst to the prisoners, are being moved around behind their backs in front of a fire. By the light of this fire and the diffuse light of the sun from outside, the shadows are cast which are all that the prisoners are able to see, or know, of anything; and since, as Plato tells us, they have been bound in this position since birth, they are in no position to suspect that these images are anything less than truly real.

  Under certain conditions, though, it may be possible for one of the prisoners to be freed. If so, the freed prisoner may turn around, seeing for the first time that there is a deeper and more profound reality behind everything he has ever seen, heard, touched, or otherwise experienced. All that he has seen before now has only been images or copies, imitating the real things of the world but lacking their true substance or reality. He now understands that not only the puppets that have cast these images, but even more profoundly, the things themselves outside in the above-ground world, have a realer and more true existence, vastly more solid and glorious than anything he’s ever known.

  This is a metaphor for the philosophical quest. Plato holds that through this quest for the true basis of reality, we can come to see that the “reality” we ordinarily perceive—what we see, touch, taste and feel—is not to be trusted. For this “reality” is akin to the shadows that the prisoners perceive on the cave wall; it’s a “reality” of images or fakes, not real at all. As Dick points out, Plato’s picture suggests that we cannot trust what our eyes and ears are telling us about what is going on. Moreover, we also can’t trust what others around us say and believe about reality, since they are also prisoners, and so are taken in by the same delusion. Instead, Plato suggests, we have to think and reason in order to begin to understand what is really going on “behind the scenes,” to break through to the true, solid “archetypal” reality that is not the world visible by means of our senses, but is nevertheless the basis for everything that happens there.

  Breakthrough to the Real

  Repeatedly throughout Dick’s works, his characters experience this kind of “breakthrough,” coming to see all of a sudden that the very reality they have inhabited through their entire lives is a fake, a kind of false image or projection. One of the most startling and disorienting forms this takes is the realization that one is oneself a fake or an imitation, that one’s whole life, personality, and even memories are actually a fabrication. In Blade Runner, when Deckard realizes that Rachael is in fact an android, even though she herself is convinced that she is an ordinary human, Deckard asks incredulously “How can it not know what it is?” Later on, Rachael herself is distressed to learn of her real status as a replicant (or android) when Deckard is able to describe in detail her “memories.” Rachael’s “experience” is thus that not only her familiar world and perceptions, but even the very reality of herself and her own personality, turns out to be a fake and a sham, a mere projection of deeper manipulative forces. In the director’s cut, this disorienting loss of the very sense of the reality of life is extended to the main character, Deckard, himself. Various clues suggest that Deckard himself may be a replicant, and the film’s last scene confirms this by showing Deckard’s discovery of a paper unicorn, which relates to a “memory” that he had formerly understood as his own. Upon making this discovery Deckard nods grimly, suddenly understanding what we, the viewers, can only have suspected: that his whole life, emotions, and experience is in fact a fake image, created for him (just as much as for us, the film audience) by technological forces beyond his control.

  The question of reality for Rachael and for Deckard (and ultimately for us, the viewers) is not the usual “philosophical” question about robots and artificial intelligence: how can we tell if something is a person or a robot, a “real” human or a “fake” imitation? Much more disconcertingly, the question is: how can I be sure that I am not a “fake,” that my life and world as I’ve experienced it is real, that my memories are really of things that actually happened to me? In witnessing the disorienting realization that both Rachael and Deckard undergo, we are forced to consider the possibility that our own life and world may themselves essentially be “fakes,” and therefore that these familiar “realities” might one day suddenly fall away, revealing the “truth” of something very different, and perhaps significantly more disturbing.

  Another example of this kind of sudden, disorienting dissolution of experienced “reality” takes place in Dick’s classic novel, Time Out of Joint. At the beginning of the novel, Ragle Gumm, a typical suburbanite living in (what he understands as) 1959 America, begins to undergo a series of disturbing experiences wherein parts of ordinary reality begin to dissolve before his eyes. Each time this occurs, moreover, the part of “reality” that has disappeared is replaced with a slip of paper “representing” it: for instance, in place of a soft-drink stand (which disturbingly dissolves before his eyes) he finds only a slip of paper on which is typed: “SOFT-DRINK STAND.” Gradually, Gumm comes to realize that the whole reality he has experienced is, similarly, a symbolic fake designed to deceive and manipulate him. In reality, it is not 1959 but 1998, and the “newspaper contest” at which he had excelled is in fact a complex symbolic ruse designed to exploit Gumm’s significant powers of calculation to predict where missiles will land in a war between the citizens of the earth and separatist colonists on the Moon. Like Rachael and Deckard, Gumm must therefore reckon with the sudden, striking realization that his whole apparent “reality” is not so, that it is an elaborately constituted fake, that all that he has known and experienced has in fact been nothing more than a sinister projection.

  In each of these cases, as for Plato’s prisoners, the “reality” that is all that we have known up to a certain point turns out to be nothing more than a series of images or projections, a show put on to deceive us and keep us in bondage. Waking up to the truly real, then, requires that we undergo a disorienting experience that is similar to the experiences of Rachael, Deckard, and Gumm. For Plato, this is the point of philosophical thinking, for this is the insight that allows us to perceive the truth and real being of what he calls the “forms,” the deeper level of reality that accounts for everything that we can see, hear, and experience in time. This deeper reality is itself timeless and unchanging, and thus can account for everything tha
t happens to us in time.

  Reality Is Not Real

  For Plato, then, the experience of a “breakdown” in normally experienced reality leads to something that is a deeper, truer, and more real reality than the one we usually experience. But for Dick’s characters, the “breakdown” experience often leads only to another shifting and changing “reality” that itself might disappear in favor of yet another one, and so forth. Is Dick, then, saying that there is no such thing as the “really” real? In other words, is his point to show us that there is nothing ultimately “to” reality, beyond the chaotic and shifting procession of utterly untrustworthy images, fake words or “simulacra” of reality built ultimately on nothing?

  In fact, this is not Dick’s point, and there is actually a positive “sense of the real” in Dick’s work that is just as profound and meaningful as Plato’s. But to see what this “sense” amounts to, we must first consider the ideas of the important twentieth-century philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan was a proponent of Sigmund Freud’s ideas about psychology and the unconscious, but he developed these ideas more philosophically than Freud himself did. In particular, Lacan extended Freud’s analysis to differentiate among three different categories or “registers” for talking about the whole structure of the universe as we experience it.